The Blues

This is part of the ruins of al-Abbas police station, which is about half a kilometre from my office.

On Monday, 19 November, at approximately 2am, Israeli warplanes fired 2 missiles at the police station, destroying it. A number of nearby civilian facilities were damaged, including the offices of al-Aalam Satellite Channel, and Wassim Abu Zaid, a correspondent for Algerian television, was injured.

Police and police stations in Gaza should be considered civilian unless they can be shown to be valid military targets; if this cannot be proven, they should be protected under international humanitarian law.

Police stations are presumptively civilian objects. However, if a police station is being used for military purposes, such as a military headquarters or a place to store weapons for use in fighting, that station could be subject to lawful attack. Such attacks in any case must not cause disproportionate civilian loss, and so must factor in any reasonably anticipated harm to police or others who are not participating in the hostilities.

13 police and security offices were destroyed by bombing over the 8 days of this last offensive. There will be further investigation into each case to determine whether any of the buildings hit were legitimate targets.

When I went to take this photograph, two police officers crossed the street to accompany me onto the site. They were nice young men. We spoke briefly in my broken Arabic about how terrible the war was for the people and how things will only improve if the Palestinian people are given their freedom.